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News, insight and analysis for the California construction industry.

Five Tech Trends for Construction in 2019

In a recently released e-book, Procore Technologies, Inc. identified five key technology trends impacting the construction industry in 2019. The underlying theme this year? The growth and power of aggregated data is shaping construction technology applications in a variety of ways.
The five trends outlined in Procore’s report include the following:

Trend 1: More BIM and More ‘Digital Twins’ – The growth of Building Information Modeling has increased the amount of mass data collected. “This mass of information must be managed in a collaborative platform that creates a “common data environment” to support ongoing needs across the project team,” Procore said. Increased data and the information it provides offers value for the owner-operator as well as the project team. “The vision is that owner-operators will be responsible for operating and maintaining both the physical asset and its connected ‘digital twin,’” the report noted. “Built assets may no longer be regarded in isolation; our digital future could see entire national infrastructure ecosystems managed digitally.”

Trend 2: More Mobile – Workers’ desire for information at their fingertips and tools to help them coordinate their work in real time, on the jobsite, is helping drive increased and improved mobile technologies and apps in the field.

Trend 3: More Visualization – Whether it’s virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, laser scanning, photogrammetry, or other tools, the design and construction of projects is increasingly shaped by new visualization technologies. These modern tools have fast overtaken the previous reliance on design drawings, sketches or quickly out-of-date site progress photos.

Trend 4: More Data – The traditional, paper-based construction industry is relying more and more on electronic information, and digital collaboration has transformed the industry, according to Procore. “21st century collaboration is about sharing and interacting with information held in the cloud, not about editing native data locally,” Procore said. “In the past, conventional information-sharing relied heavily on strong version-control, or at least knowing when a “snapshot” was taken. Today, information is often dynamic, streamed in real time.”

Trend 5: Big Data and Artificial Intelligence – The mass amount of machine-generated data is driving demand for technologies that use artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning – even in the under-digitized construction market.